CIA prisons - Poland is not a banana republic, says PM

Prime Minister Tusk said that alleged evidence of CIA black sites in Poland proves that politicians can no longer make secret arrangements and not expect them to eventually see the light of day.

“This is not the 19th century and Poland is not [a banana republic],” Tusk told reporters.

“This may be painful, but concrete evidence that Poland is no longer a country where politicians can fix something under the table and expect it not to [eventually] come out – even if they do so with the world’s greatest superpower,” Tusk said when asked for his reaction to the news that a former intelligence services chief will face charges connected to CIA ‘back sites’ in Poland.

Earlier this week, former chief of Poland’s intelligence services (UW) Zbigniew Siemiatkowski confirmed that prosecutors told him during a meeting in January that they were going to lay charges against him for “unlawful deprivation of liberty,” and “corporal punishment” against prisoners-of-war in their investigation that Poland hosted a CIA prison where suspected terrorist suspects were held.

Two prisoners in Guantanamo Bay , Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, have said they had been held in a prison in Poland and have been given ‘victim status’ by prosecutors in Warsaw.

When asked how reporters got hold of the information that Zbigniew Siemiatkowski would be charged, in what is meant to be a confidential investigation, Tusk said: “I talked about this many times with the Attorney General {Andrzej Seremet]. Some laws allow prosecutors to liaise with potential victims and their representatives. I can not exclude that this is a very common source of [the leaks],” he said.

“Let me remind you that, in a sense, Poland was a political victim of indiscretions by some participants in the US administration from a few years ago," Tusk added, referring to leaks from within the CIA or elsewhere to Human Rights Watch and Washington Post who first raised the allegations of the black sites in Poland in 2005.

Poland’s prosecution services are refusing to comment on the latest developments in the investigation and would not confirm where the information came from that the former intelligence chief is to face charges. (pg)